Ring Cycle Tarot - Wagner's Ring, Arthur Rackham, everything-I-Love Tarot due for rel

wonderful news! I love Rackham and the work he did for Wagner's Ring is awesome. I've got only one deck by Schiffer (Sidhe), which is a bit difficult to shuffle, but that's not going to be a problem, while the borders are... well they aren't nice. I didn't know anything about the playing cards by Prospero, guess I'll order both the Alice and the Ring deck, so many thanks for all this information!

My amazon page shows the Ring Cycle deck is now available, but out of stock.
Anyone have it and can you share some images and thoughts please?

Everywhere I look it seems unavailable (I don't think it was ever available on amazon - I've been watching closely!). I think the only place I saw it in stock (a while back) was Schiffer's home page. If it weren't for this, I'd be thinking there's been some hold up at the printers.

Anxiously waiting for this one!

I pre-ordered this deck from Amazon on Dec 26. I was hoping to have it by May 31 (Amazon's promised delivery date). I just checked my account, and it says they are temporarily out of stock, but that it would be available soon!

Such aggro, because about 2 weeks ago, they said it hadn't been printed or released yet!

I suppose they only received a few decks, and that some people had pre-ordered before myself. Guess I will have to wait, and I hope the wait is worth it!

I've just mentally prepared myself to receive it in August or something.

I think it's probably not ready yet and they're stringing us along. I'm OK with that. I have enough to read and study. I'll permit myself to get really excited over it when I know it is on its way.

So I've had a few days with it. From the point of view of tarot creation, it is a great feat. It is somebody's vision that they have been burning to make real, a very ambitious superimposition of tarot onto the Ring Cycle or vice-verse.

This deck will require serious work - I sort-of-know the Ring Cycle- I mean, I know the music, have read the librettos, followed the operas. Not a specialist or delirious Wagner fan, but not a layman either. There is enough in the Ring, in Nineteenth Century Epic grandiosity, ancient myth and delicate Rackham illustration to get my excitement levels rising.

But I do have a sense in 2015 of deck after deck after deck after deck washing over me - requiring serious work and investment and becoming yet another deck with which to acquaint myself with. Something I will dedicate more time to on a rainy day.

Things that strike me; it isn't RWS. I struggle to find RWS-ness in it. That of course is wonderful. The Greenwood is like that. It's stretching and stimulating. But if anyone is thinking of buying it - it isn't a read-out-of-the-box deck. And the cards (much as I love Rackham), don't feel like the type of cards you can just "toss" the book and be intuitive. The cards do not depict enough to really get intuitive juices going. And its textual, mythical background stares you in the face. You really don't want to not do it justice, do you?

Quite a lot of brown details of larger images. Quite a lot of brown, in fact.

The book is thick. Much thicker than the Mary-El book, though it is the same format. Just as a taster; there is a fifty page synopsis of the Ring Cycle between pages 17 and 64 into which cards are references in brackets so you can see where they fit into the narrative. But you would have to seriously memorise this. Then very thorough card by card meanings, Fool to 10 of Nibelungs via the Courts. There are also abbreviated divinatory meanings later in the book for quick reference.

But you really have to know you stuff. I honestly can't see any way round it. With the Thoth and the Liber T (two decks I think of as "difficult") there are richly symbolic and intoxicating images. These cards are quite dark close ups, very peopled images and those people represent something, a slice of the story, a climax or key moment. If you don't know what's happening, it's a rocky crag or a gnome in a cave.

I am all for rich decks that require work. I thought that this week, I'd have had a play around (I was dying for it to arrive) but as I haven't memorised any part of the book yet, it sort of feels untouchable.

Le Fanu, I get the feeling from your post that this deck isn't a reading deck per se, but more of a musical/art appreciation deck labelled Tarot to attract buyers, not a true tarot deck.

As passionate as I am about The Ring and the Rackham art, this deck is not on my buy list. I'd rather spend the money on a Ring recording.

I got the deck about a week ago, but I felt like I didn't want to dive in until I had some better background. So I've been reading the libretto (downloaded from Project Gutenberg, which has the Rackham illustrations!) and snooping around on websites, and I'm seriously considering signing up for Met Opera On Demand to watch everything in four days/nights straight. Maybe starting this weekend.

I feel like all that might get me from 0 to 60 on the Ring. THEN I'll open up the box and get started with the book and the cards. As Le Fanu says, it looks like there are plenty of mythological/legendary themes to render plenty of tarot goodness!

This may be the only deck I've done so much work on BEFORE I picked it up and read the book! (Well, I did try to read up on Minoan religion beforehand, but that was just because I was impatient . . .) I very much hope that the deck rewards the effort, but then I'm sure it will because even if the deck doesn't work for me, I've learned a little about prominent sliver of western culture . . .

I'll let you know how the opera watching marathon works out!

I'm really interested in the artwork of this deck, but I understand nothing of the background which ties it all together. It seems clear from what's being said that you need to do some deep study to use this deck, but I can't help asking - will I be completely lost until I've read the book, passed the advanced course, and written my thesis on the subject? I just like the pretty pictures and I want to have fun reading with it. What to do?

Heeeeello guys! I've been meaning to post on here for a while, but haven't got around to it till now...

Anyway, I don't have the deck (though I think it's absolutely gorgeous), but for those of you who mentioned not knowing anything about the mythos associated with this deck, there are actually a lot of fairly accessible versions of this story aside from Wagner's Ring and the book that comes with the deck. (In fact, Wanger's Ring is quite different in some aspects from the stories of Sigurd the Dragonslayer it was based on.)

The Volsungasaga (Saga of the Volsungs) is, in my opinion, the most accessible and closest to the heart of the story in terms of Sigurd and his journeys. (Penguin Classics has a paperback version that's pretty cheap.) However, the Volsungasaga doesn't go into Gudrun (Krimhild's) revenge, which is a large part of Wagner's Ring and the most complete (again, in my opinion) telling of Krimhild's revenge, Das Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs) (which was the inspiration for Wagner's opera). The Nibelungenlied is a poetic telling of Sigurd's (or Sifried's, in this case) death and Krimhild's revenge, and is generally fairly easy to read, though it gets a little slow in places. (The version I have was translated by Burton Raffel and published by Yale University Press.)

There is also a version of this story (titled The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun) written by J.R.R. Tolkien, though I haven't read that version yet. (It's sitting on my desk currently waiting for me to finish the Poetic Edda, which, by the way, also mentions Sigurd briefly. As does the Prose Edda.)

So ah...there you have it! (I may have nerded out a little there...) They may not be for everyone, but these books are a great way to learn these famous stories in their original (mostly) forms, examine the evolution of a story passed down over literally thousands of years, and explore the transformation of literature as a whole. Great stuff!

And to get back on topic a little, I'm actually pretty sure I'll get this deck. I'm obviously pretty invested in the story as a whole, though not necessarily Wagner's version, and the artwork is just too good to pass up! I'd be excited to use my intuition and knowledge of the stories to interpret the cards. That'd be so much fun!